I’ve traveled to over a hundred different countries in my life. Many of these places lack the relative comfort and safety of North America. But I’ve also seen this lack of a social safety net drive people to accomplish amazing things.

Nearly everyone in the developing world is an entrepreneur — because they have to be. The problems they deal with on a daily basis are more immediate, so they’re under greater pressure to innovate solutions.

Most North American founders I’ve met are never truly in danger of falling through the cracks. If their startup doesn’t work, most can move back in with the parents who probably paid for them to attend business school.

But in places where failure is not an option, people work harder to make their dreams come true. I’ve seen it more times than I can count — but the clearest example is a man named Juan Carlos, the first friend I ever made outside the United States.

This is his story. I’m sharing it with you to illustrate what he taught me about pushing through obstacles so that you can remind yourself not to give up when you encounter them.

Opportunities will find you if you’re prepared to acknowledge them

At 15, Juan Carlos hitchhiked from Mexico City to the Mayan Riviera because he had heard that was where people went to earn money. When he arrived, he discovered it would be impossible if he didn’t learn English.

So Juan lived on the edge of town, in a hammock, surrounded by dozens of others, making $3 an hour raking seaweed off the beach. He would walk 12 miles to the city’s downtown area every day to eat in a cheap restaurant because it allowed him to save an extra 50 cents.

With the money he saved, Juan Carlos bought an English-Spanish dictionary. He used his spare time teaching himself how to speak English.

On one of his trips downtown, Juan Carlos met a man who was creating astounding street paintings using the soot from a candle to stain canvas. This technique, called “fumage,” produces delicate, ethereal textures in ways no other medium can accomplish.

Juan Carlos knew nothing about painting, but he knew talent when he saw it. He approached the man and announced his intention to start a business with him, selling the paintings to tourists.

The only person who can prevent you from starting a business is you

Of course, having a business idea is only half the battle. Juan Carlos soon realized he would need a place to sell these paintings if he wanted his venture to succeed.

So he traveled to Plaza Caracol, learned who the office manager was, and asked for a meeting with the plaza’s American owner. The manager was dismissive at first, then outright rude when Juan Carlos continued to make requests.

Still, Juan Carlos continued to visit and politely request an appointment. As luck would have it, the owner happened to be on site during one of these attempts and overheard. He quickly stepped in, and despite his office manager’s protestations, listened to Juan Carlos’s proposal.

Juan Carlos’s dedication impressed the owner, especially after learning how long he had been trying to reach him. They made an agreement: The owner would set Juan Carlos up with a space and the equipment he needed to sell the paintings, but would charge him a small amount of rent on principle. It wasn’t greed; it was a sign of respect — a vote of confidence that Juan Carlos’s business would prove to be profitable.

By the time I met Juan, he had eight people working for him to create fumage paintings and could sell them in no less than seven languages. He never gave up, never took no for an answer, and ultimately created his own success.

Tenacity is more valuable for a founder than any amount of connections

I won’t pretend that founders from the developed world don’t have significant advantages over those who grow up in dangerous or impoverished environments. That would simply be a lie.

But one point I’m trying to make with this story is that founders in wealthier countries often squander those advantages. They let the first rejection or minor obstacle stop them dead in their tracks, when the world is full of people willing to work exponentially harder for even a fraction of the success they want.

Most aspiring entrepreneurs in the United States wouldn’t take the time to learn a single new language — let alone seven — if that made the difference between success and failure. And many would avoid following up with a potential partner after being turned away out of sheer embarrassment or hurt pride. What we don’t realize is that it’s a luxury to have these concerns. Embarrassment is not a factor when you’re sleeping outside in a hammock to get your business off the ground.

Most people who achieve real success respect this because they’ve faced challenges of their own. The owner of the Plaza Caracol didn’t give Juan Carlos his chance just to placate him. He did it because he saw his own determination reflected in Juan Carlos’s willingness to keep trying.

I’ve never forgotten what Juan Carlos taught me about tenacity. It’s what drove me to develop my company’s roof restoration product for asphalt shingles at a time when the rest of the industry was focused on selling replacements. It’s what helped me maintain my belief in the value of our company and grow our national dealer network at a time of unprecedented economic uncertainty. In our present moment, as the global economy is being reshuffled yet again, I remind myself that we can never take our success for granted. The rest of the world already understands this; we’re the ones who need to learn from them.

I’ve traveled to over a hundred different countries in my life. Many of these places lack the relative comfort and safety of North America. But I’ve also seen this lack of a social safety net drive people to accomplish amazing things.

Nearly everyone in the developing world is an entrepreneur — because they have to be. The problems they deal with on a daily basis are more immediate, so they’re under greater pressure to innovate solutions.

Most North American founders I’ve met are never truly in danger of falling through the cracks. If their startup doesn’t work, most can move back in with the parents who probably paid for them to attend business school.

This week on How Success Happens, I sat down with Mamadou Ndiaye, the internet zoologist behind the insanely funny and popular Casual Geographic channel. He’s the guy who turned “animals that can f*cking end you” into a thriving brand, a book, and millions of followers by mixing deep nature research with killer comedy. We’ve broken down his success insights to help you bite off a chunk of success in three, two, one!

Listen here

Subscribe now: Apple | Spotify | YouTube

Three Key Insights

1. Marry Your Two Weirdest Interests

Mamadou didn’t start out thinking, “I’m going to be an animal content creator”—in fact, he actively avoided it because he didn’t think anyone cared about zoology as much as he did. He majored in environmental science (“more asbestos than animals,” he says) and assumed that his love of wildlife and comedy would stay a hobby. His big unlock for aspiring creators: “If you’re able to marry your two biggest interests, then you have the foundation for what could be a really strong channel.” For him, that meant combining a lifelong obsession with animals and a slightly sick sense of humor into one uniquely memorable voice.

Takeaway: List your two strongest fascinations and deliberately build a project that forces them to collide.

2. Ride What Works—Then Systematize It

Casual Geographic started with one “throwaway” TikTok about “animals that are way bigger than you think” after Mamadou saw a moose towering over cars on a highway. That video popped, and instead of shrugging and moving on, he did “the typical TikTok thing where something works for you, you drive it into the dirt”—and that became the backbone of his whole brand. Over time, he evolved from waking up on Monday and posting a finished video by Friday “just off vibes” to a serious creative system. These days, he’s thinking several videos ahead, obsessing over curiosity-gap titles and thumbnails, and crafting scripts to feel like “a FaceTime call” with the viewer. As he put it, satisfying that curiosity gap is one of the most important parts of winning on YouTube.

Takeaway: When something resonates, double down—and then build a repeatable process to keep delivering that kind of hit on purpose, not by accident.

3. Outsource Without Losing Your Voice

For a long time, Mamadou refused to hire editors because “it was my baby” and he didn’t want to hand it off, even as tech issues and editing time started eating his life. Eventually, he reframed it as reinvesting in the channel and respecting opportunity cost: “What are you losing by expending this time? Time is obviously the greatest resource.” Now he works with multiple editors, uses scripts with hyperlinked assets, and deliberately leaves gaps where pros can “cook” while he stays firmly in control of the story. He’s still pushing himself to relinquish more control over time, but sees outsourcing as essential if you want to grow: “There is a middle ground where you can outsource, but still retain a lot of control in the production.”

Takeaway: Identify the bottleneck task that drains your energy and hire help there so you can focus on the creative work only you can do.

Subscribe to the free How Success Happens Newsletter for weekly inspiration.

Two Free Resources to Learn More

You can dive into Mamadou’s wonderfully disturbing animal universe on his Casual Geographic YouTube channel and follow him on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook under @mndiaye_97.

For more on turning a passion into a project, check how this guy turned one of the most dangerous hobbies on the planet into a thriving speaking business.

One question to ponder

Mamadou talked about marrying your strangest interests into something only you could make. So here’s my question for you: If you combined the two things you’re most obsessively drawn to, what wildly specific project or business would you build?

Email your answer to howsuccesshappens@entrepreneur.com—I’d love to read some of them on a future episode.

About How Success Happens

Each episode of How Success Happens shares the inspiring, entertaining, and unexpected journeys that influential leaders in business, the arts, and sports traveled on their way to becoming household names. It’s a reminder that behind every big-time career, there is a person who persisted in the face of self-doubt, failure, and anything else that got thrown in their way.

This week on How Success Happens, I sat down with Mamadou Ndiaye, the internet zoologist behind the insanely funny and popular Casual Geographic channel. He’s the guy who turned “animals that can f*cking end you” into a thriving brand, a book, and millions of followers by mixing deep nature research with killer comedy. We’ve broken down his success insights to help you bite off a chunk of success in three, two, one!

Listen here

Subscribe now: Apple | Spotify | YouTube

Three Key Insights

1. Marry Your Two Weirdest Interests

Mamadou didn’t start out thinking, “I’m going to be an animal content creator”—in fact, he actively avoided it because he didn’t think anyone cared about zoology as much as he did. He majored in environmental science (“more asbestos than animals,” he says) and assumed that his love of wildlife and comedy would stay a hobby. His big unlock for aspiring creators: “If you’re able to marry your two biggest interests, then you have the foundation for what could be a really strong channel.” For him, that meant combining a lifelong obsession with animals and a slightly sick sense of humor into one uniquely memorable voice.

For years, Portugal occupied a unique position in the global mobility economy.

While many countries tightened immigration rules and raised barriers to citizenship, Portugal became one of Europe’s most accessible destinations for entrepreneurs, investors, retirees, remote workers and skilled professionals seeking a pathway into the European Union.

The country’s appeal extended beyond its climate, safety and quality of life. What truly distinguished Portugal was time.

Five years.

That was all it took for a legal resident to become eligible to apply for Portuguese citizenship, one of the shortest naturalization timelines in Europe. For globally mobile entrepreneurs and families, that timeline became one of Portugal’s most valuable exports.

Now, that advantage is disappearing. Portugal recently approved sweeping changes to its nationality laws, extending the residency requirement for citizenship from five years to ten years for most foreign nationals and seven years for citizens of Portuguese-speaking countries. The reforms also introduce stricter integration requirements and tougher standards for obtaining nationality.

On the surface, this may appear to be an immigration story. In reality, it is an economic one.

Portugal is effectively increasing the cost of access to one of the world’s most valuable assets: a European Union passport. Unlike a tax increase or a higher investment threshold, the new cost is measured in time. For entrepreneurs, investors and internationally mobile families, time can be more valuable than money.

For more than a decade, Portugal benefited from a powerful global trend. As wealth became increasingly mobile, people began searching for stable jurisdictions that offered economic opportunity, political security and long-term mobility. Portugal emerged as one of the biggest winners.

The country’s Golden Visa program attracted billions of euros in foreign investment. Digital nomads arrived in growing numbers. International entrepreneurs established businesses. Retirees relocated. Foreign residents poured into Lisbon, Porto, Braga and the Algarve.

The numbers tell the story

Portugal’s foreign resident population has surged to more than 1.5 million people, a remarkable figure for a country of just over 10 million inhabitants. In 2023 alone, more than 140,000 individuals acquired Portuguese citizenship. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of nationality applications accumulated in government backlogs.

Portugal’s success created an unexpected challenge.

The very policies designed to attract talent and investment also fueled concerns about housing affordability, integration, population growth and the long-term meaning of citizenship itself. As immigration became a central political issue across Europe, Portugal was no longer immune to the pressures facing governments from Amsterdam to Berlin.

The result is a significant shift in strategy.

For years, Portugal competed by reducing friction. The message was simple: move here, integrate, contribute to society and after five years you could become Portuguese.

Today, the government is signaling something different. Citizenship remains available, but it will require a much longer commitment.

That change matters far beyond Portugal

For entrepreneurs, citizenship is increasingly viewed as a form of strategic infrastructure. Just as founders diversify suppliers, banking relationships and revenue streams, many globally mobile families diversify residency and citizenship options. Access to multiple jurisdictions can provide flexibility during political uncertainty, simplify business expansion, improve mobility and create opportunities for future generations.

Portugal’s five-year pathway made it one of the most attractive destinations in that ecosystem. Doubling the timeline fundamentally changes the calculation.

Some applicants will still choose Portugal because of its quality of life, access to European markets and long-term stability. Others may begin exploring alternatives, including Italy, Greece or emerging mobility hubs outside Europe such as Dubai.

More importantly, Portugal’s decision may signal a broader trend.

The past decade was defined by competition for mobile capital and global talent. Governments introduced startup visas, investment migration programs and digital nomad initiatives in an effort to attract people and money.

The next decade may be defined by selectivity.

Across the developed world, governments are reassessing how citizenship is earned, who qualifies and what obligations should accompany it. In that environment, access is becoming scarcer.

Portugal has not closed the door to citizenship. It has simply made the journey longer. Yet the implications are significant. For future applicants, the difference between five years and ten years is not merely administrative. It affects investment decisions, business planning, family relocation strategies and long-term wealth preservation.

Ultimately, Portugal’s new law is about more than residency requirements. It reflects a growing realization among governments that citizenship has become an increasingly valuable economic asset in a world defined by mobility.

For years, Portugal offered one of Europe’s fastest paths to that asset.

What businesses, investors and policymakers can learn from Portugal’s decision is that access, mobility and citizenship are increasingly governed by the same economic principle that shapes markets: scarcity creates value. As governments become more selective about who they admit and how citizenship is earned, long-term planning, adaptability and strategic thinking will matter more than ever for those seeking opportunities across borders.

For years, Portugal occupied a unique position in the global mobility economy.

While many countries tightened immigration rules and raised barriers to citizenship, Portugal became one of Europe’s most accessible destinations for entrepreneurs, investors, retirees, remote workers and skilled professionals seeking a pathway into the European Union.

The country’s appeal extended beyond its climate, safety and quality of life. What truly distinguished Portugal was time.

The Mohican State Park trail in Ohio is nearly 25 miles long. As the only trail in the entire state to hold an Epic designation from the International Mountain Bicycling Association (IMBA), it offers a true backcountry riding experience, with steep single-track trails that abruptly plunge into sweeping river valleys and densely wooded patches alike.

This is not a trail for casual riders. Completing such a trek requires more than enthusiasm; it requires strategy and instinct. You need to anticipate challenges before they appear in your path, conserve your energy for the most challenging stretches and allow yourself to rest and recover when you’ve earned it.

I grew up in Ohio, and I’ve ridden the Mohican State Park trail more times than I can count. I find myself thinking of it often, even when I’m nowhere near my mountain bike. In fact, some of the lessons it’s taught me about patience, stamina and willpower have been most valuable when I’ve faced challenges scaling my business.

My brother Todd and I started Roof Maxx in 2017 to give homeowners a cost-effective alternative to premature roof replacement. Since then, we’ve grown it into an eight-figure business with dealers in every state. But just like any worthwhile mountain biking route, the pathway to getting there has been anything but linear. Here’s what my time on the trail has taught me about how to navigate it.

Recognizing the difference between persistence and stubbornness

Persistence is a valuable quality to have whenever you’re doing something challenging. Whether you’re navigating through rocks and roots on a steep descent through dense pines with no convenient place to pull off the trail or trying to hit a critical revenue target before the end of the quarter, there’s often no room in sport or business to simply stop trying.

But persistence doesn’t mean exhausting yourself prematurely, and continuing to throw yourself headlong at a problem isn’t always the most effective way to solve it. That’s usually the point at which persistence becomes stubbornness, and stubbornness at the wrong moment often has consequences.

Persistence is a commitment to dealing with a challenge. Stubbornness is an insistence on trying the same tactic over and over again until it finally works. The other common name for that, of course, is insanity.

It’s also a waste of resources. Pedaling as hard as you can, even when the terrain will allow you to coast, uses up your energy and leaves you without the stamina you’ll need for the next hill climb. Maintaining aggressive goals for your dealers, even when profits are up, could push some of them to oversell your product and damage their relationships with customers. That’s why Roof Maxx has always worked with our dealers to agree on mutually acceptable minimum targets and give them the autonomy to set their own pace as long as they’re able to meet them.

Going too fast is a recipe for disaster

I’ve seen friends go to the hospital when they tried to simply “send it” on a difficult section of trail instead of planning their approach. I’ve also met my fair share of roofing contractors who overextended themselves by selling more services than they could reasonably perform in a timely manner.

In one case, the result might be a broken collarbone or torn ligament. In the other case, it’s usually a damaged brand. Both can take years to heal, and both could easily have been avoided with a little more foresight and caution.

It’s not always easy to recognize when you’re going too fast, because speed is exhilarating. All you notice is the breeze whipping by your face and the blur of the leaves as you cut through trees; you don’t see the sudden curve until it’s already too late to hit the brakes. Then suddenly, you’re going over the handlebars.

This is why so much of the training Roof Maxx provides to our dealers is focused on effective territory and lead management. We do everything in our power to ensure that dealers know how to effectively plan and schedule the treatments they sell to avoid bottlenecks or service delays. While other contractors in the roofing industry have historically tried to sell as many high-margin services as possible, my philosophy has always been that long-term success means working at a sustainable pace. Anyone selling the Roof Maxx product learns the same lesson when they onboard so they can avoid learning it the hard way later.

Growing your business means learning to read the path ahead

Anytime you do something worthwhile, you’re going to face risks and challenges. That’s not a reason to quit; it’s a warning to prepare yourself for them.

You don’t go mountain biking without checking the pressure in your tires beforehand, packing a first-aid kit and sharing your itinerary with a friend so they can call for help if something unexpected occurs.

You don’t go into business selling a product like Roof Maxx without rigorously testing it first, training your dealers to sell and apply it properly and working with them to create mutually beneficial agreements. All of those steps help you proactively prevent problems down the road.

The Mohican State Park trail in Ohio is nearly 25 miles long. As the only trail in the entire state to hold an Epic designation from the International Mountain Bicycling Association (IMBA), it offers a true backcountry riding experience, with steep single-track trails that abruptly plunge into sweeping river valleys and densely wooded patches alike.

This is not a trail for casual riders. Completing such a trek requires more than enthusiasm; it requires strategy and instinct. You need to anticipate challenges before they appear in your path, conserve your energy for the most challenging stretches and allow yourself to rest and recover when you’ve earned it.

I grew up in Ohio, and I’ve ridden the Mohican State Park trail more times than I can count. I find myself thinking of it often, even when I’m nowhere near my mountain bike. In fact, some of the lessons it’s taught me about patience, stamina and willpower have been most valuable when I’ve faced challenges scaling my business.

On paper, our client looked like the ultimate win. They had scaled to 250 seats. They represented a substantial portion of our revenue, and the account was actively growing. By every traditional metric, this appeared to be a client worth celebrating.

But if you looked beyond the spreadsheet, they were a nightmare.

Every time this client’s name popped up on Slack or email, my team flinched. They would anxiously brace for impact. Instead of delivering proactive value, they found themselves constantly putting out fires. The client escalated every tiny hiccup into a major crisis, and my leadership team was spending hours untangling problems that should never have existed in the first place.

One day, an uncomfortable truth hit me. We were protecting the revenue, but it was coming at the expense of the culture we had carefully spent years building.

Here’s what I now know: getting a business to seven figures is largely about who you let in. Scaling to eight figures is more about who you’re willing to let go.

One thing nobody tells you when you’re building a business is that some businesses become less healthy as they grow. In the early stages, it’s easy to convince yourself that every paying client is a good client. Revenue feels validating, and saying yes feels like momentum.

That mindset fueled our initial growth. Eventually, however, I had to admit that some clients were costing us far more than they were paying us—not just financially, but operationally, emotionally and culturally.

The wrong-fit clients created constant urgency, distracted strong employees from important work, consumed leadership bandwidth and forced the company into reactive behavior instead of strategic growth. At first, I treated these situations as isolated problems. Eventually, I realized the pattern was the problem.

I wish I could say I immediately made the right decision. I didn’t.

Like most founders, I rationalized keeping them. I told myself the difficulties were temporary. I convinced myself the revenue mattered too much to walk away from. Most dangerously, I believed scaling meant learning how to tolerate more pressure.

But I was wrong. There is an important difference between pressure and misalignment.

Healthy growth inevitably creates pressure. Incompatibility creates drag.

Once I understood that distinction, we became much more intentional about who we worked with. That meant having uncomfortable conversations, exiting some accounts and turning down opportunities that would have looked exciting a year earlier.

In the short term, those decisions felt risky. Walking away from revenue is emotionally difficult when you remember how hard it was to generate it in the first place.

But almost immediately, the company became lighter. Communication improved. Managers had more space to think strategically. Team morale improved. The people who had been buried in reactive work suddenly had time to strengthen processes, solve bigger problems and deliver more value to the clients who were actually a fit.

Protect your team’s decision-making before you protect revenue

What surprised me most was that this wasn’t just affecting morale. It was affecting how my team actually thought and made decisions.

Yale neuroscientist Amy Arnsten has shown that under acute, uncontrollable stress, the brain floods the prefrontal cortex — the region responsible for judgment, planning and complex decisions — with norepinephrine and dopamine that rapidly weaken it while strengthening the more primitive, reactive responses run by the amygdala. Under prolonged stress, the prefrontal cortex physically atrophies. In other words, a chronically stressed employee isn’t just unhappy; they have measurably less access to the exact brain functions good work depends on. They become more reactive and less capable of thoughtful decision-making.

It would be impossible to eliminate stress, and not all stress is unhealthy. When there’s genuine danger, you want to be fast and reflexive rather than slow and deliberate. Time-bound pressure is part of why humans survive and build. The problem is the other kind of stress: the chronic, uncontrolled grind of a relationship that never resolves. That’s the buildup that ends in burnout. Gallup found burned-out employees are 2.6 times more likely to be actively job-hunting, and a Harvard Business School study put the turnover cost of a single toxic presence on a team at roughly $12,000.

Don’t mistake loss aversion for good leadership

If you catch yourself thinking, “But the client does add to revenue,” or “What if I let them go and regret it?” or “What if my good clients leave after I fire them?” that’s the flinch. It’s a normal fear response; most of us are wired for it.

The reframe that gets me past it is a single question:

How much freedom, and how much of my team’s capacity, could I redirect toward actually growing the company over the next 12 months if I let this client go today?

One caveat: don’t fire clients for being small. Small clients grow, refer and surprise you. Fire clients for being misaligned and draining. Size is a number; fit is a pattern. Don’t confuse the two.

Measure the hidden cost of every client relationship

Once you accept that some revenue is more expensive than it looks, you need a way to measure it. Mike Michalowicz, in The Pumpkin Plan, gave me a framework I keep returning to. He compares growing a business to growing a prize pumpkin. You don’t feed every vine equally. You identify the strongest growers, prune the rest and pour everything you have into the few that are actually thriving.

Translated to client work, the question is whether each client is profitable at the effort they actually require, and whether that profitability is trending up or down. Take a client’s revenue, divide it by the hours your team pours into them and compare that figure to the minimum hourly rate your business needs to clear. If they’re below your floor and the trend isn’t improving, you have a red flag.

This works whether you have three clients or three hundred because you’re measuring each client against your own cost floor rather than against your other clients. A high-demand client in a small book can still clear the bar easily, as long as the revenue justifies the effort.

If you don’t want to run the numbers, there’s a faster gut-check. When their name lights up your phone and your instinct is to brace, that’s usually the same answer the math would give you.

A client below the line today might be a fast grower or a critical referral engine. Always make the misaligned-versus-merely-small judgment before you make your move. But once you spot true misalignment, have the courage to cut the cord. Your path to eight figures depends on it.

The clients you keep shape the company you build. They influence your culture, your systems, your leadership team and, eventually, your growth ceiling.

Last year, I wrote about building a company through trust, loyalty, appreciation and proactiveness. This year, I learned something equally important: protecting those values sometimes requires letting the wrong people go. In many cases, that’s exactly what makes the next stage of growth possible.

On paper, our client looked like the ultimate win. They had scaled to 250 seats. They represented a substantial portion of our revenue, and the account was actively growing. By every traditional metric, this appeared to be a client worth celebrating.

But if you looked beyond the spreadsheet, they were a nightmare.

Every time this client’s name popped up on Slack or email, my team flinched. They would anxiously brace for impact. Instead of delivering proactive value, they found themselves constantly putting out fires. The client escalated every tiny hiccup into a major crisis, and my leadership team was spending hours untangling problems that should never have existed in the first place.

For years, the rule in text-to-speech has been simple. If you wanted the best-sounding voice for your product, you paid enterprise pricing. If you wanted cheap, you accepted robotic. If you wanted fast, you gave up something on both. That rule just broke.

The trade-off every product team has been forced to make

If you have ever built a voice agent, a phone system, or a real-time reader, you know the drill. You audition four or five models. One sounds incredible and costs more than your infrastructure. One is affordable and sounds like a GPS from 2009. One is fast, but only in three languages. You pick the least bad option and ship.

Then the invoice arrives.

And every quarter, your CFO asks the same question: why is voice the single most expensive line item in the stack?

What just changed on the leaderboards

This week, Speechify’s Simba 3.2 moved to first place on the Artificial Analysis text-to-speech leaderboard, ranking above ElevenLabs, Cartesia, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind. On Voice Arena, the blind-listener benchmark modeled on Chatbot Arena, it sits at the top for real-time models at its price point.

Neither leaderboard is run by Speechify. Neither uses self-reported scores. Native speakers hear two clips without knowing which model made which, and they vote for whichever sounds more natural.

Simba 3.2 is now the highest-rated real-time voice model a team can put in production today.

Here is where it gets uncomfortable for the incumbents.

The three numbers that matter

For anyone building with voice, only three things ever really mattered: quality, latency, and cost. Every model release has forced a compromise on at least one of them.

1. Quality. Simba 3.2 is ranked number one on Artificial Analysis and on top for quality and price on Voice Arena. Both benchmarks are independent. Both are blind.

2. Latency. It is a streaming-native model with lower time-to-first-byte than its predecessors, built for voice agents that respond in real time rather than after a pause that ruins the conversation. All sub-100ms. 

3. Cost. It is listed at $10 per one million characters, dropping to $6 per one million characters on the Scale tier. That makes it the cheapest model in the Artificial Analysis top ten, over fifteen times more affordable than ElevenLabs and roughly six times more affordable than Cartesia, according to the company.

Best-sounding, fastest, and cheapest have almost never described the same model. Now they do.

Credit: Speechify

Why this happened

The usual story with AI models is that the lab optimizes for the benchmark, prices for enterprise buyers, and lets the developer platform inherit whatever margin is left over. Speechify built it in the opposite order.

The same voice technology has been running inside a consumer product used by more than sixty million people for years. That audience does not tolerate a robotic voice, a two-second delay before the first word, or the kind of unit economics that only work at enterprise pricing. Every A/B test in that product fed back into the model.

“We made the architecture decisions at the beginning that most labs put off until later,” explained Raheel Kazi, an engineering leader at Speechify. “We never wanted to sacrifice on cost to chase quality, or sacrifice on quality to chase latency. We took the harder route on purpose. Hitting SOTA on all three at once is what that decision was always for.”

“This is the underdog story for API providers,” Luke Oliff, Head of Developer Relations at Speechify, said in a press release. “We spent years making our models run efficiently because our consumer business demanded it, tens of millions of listeners, with some of the best voices on the planet. That work is why we can now put the best-rated model in the world on our API at about as cheap as it comes. Most labs are built for the benchmark and priced for the enterprise. We built for listeners and priced for production.”

What Artificial Analysis and Voice Arena actually test

Neither leaderboard is the kind of benchmark a vendor can game.

Artificial Analysis runs on live serverless API endpoints, four times a day at random times, using a randomly selected voice, a unique 500-character prompt, and a standardized audio sample rate. Latency is measured end-to-end, all the way to when the audio file lands locally. 

Voice Arena uses the same blind pair-comparison principle across six languages, with a balanced voice slate per model rather than each vendor’s best-sounding default. The methodology was developed with input from Prof. Shinji Watanabe of Carnegie Mellon University.

On both boards, quality is scored the same way. Pairs of clips generated from identical text are played to native speakers in blind comparisons. Listeners choose which sounds more natural. Votes get aggregated into an Elo rating. No self-reported score, no vendor-selected clip, no internal panel, and no provider pays for inclusion or ranking.

For a model to sit near the top of both, it has to satisfy an objective performance evaluation and a blind human preference vote across multiple languages. Simba 3.2 does.

SpeechifyAI Agents and Speechify’s Developer Platform

Alongside the leaderboard result, Speechify is launching Voice Agents for businesses and a developer platform, both at speechify.ai. The model powering both is the same one running its consumer apps.

Simba 3.2 is a streaming-native model with low time-to-first-byte, fine-grained emotional control, and SSML prosody, engineered to sound natural in real-time voice applications. According to the company, more voices, additional languages, and an even lower-cost tier are already on the roadmap.

“Simba 3.2 is our best model yet, now available on Speechify.ai,” Cliff Weitzman, CEO and Founder of Speechify, shared in a public post. “It’s built to power voice agents at scale and perfected from millions of A/B tests we run in our consumer platform. In TTS APIs, three things matter: cost, quality, and latency. Simba 3.2 has achieved SOTA on this trifecta. Beyond excited for you to experience it firsthand to power your experiences.”

So is this the end of paying enterprise prices for voice?

For the teams that have already spent six figures on a voice bill this year, the answer is starting to look obvious.

For the teams that haven’t yet, the question is how long they are willing to keep paying for a trade-off that no longer exists.

Voice AI used to make you choose. It doesn’t anymore.

For years, the rule in text-to-speech has been simple. If you wanted the best-sounding voice for your product, you paid enterprise pricing. If you wanted cheap, you accepted robotic. If you wanted fast, you gave up something on both. That rule just broke.

The trade-off every product team has been forced to make

If you have ever built a voice agent, a phone system, or a real-time reader, you know the drill. You audition four or five models. One sounds incredible and costs more than your infrastructure. One is affordable and sounds like a GPS from 2009. One is fast, but only in three languages. You pick the least bad option and ship.

Then the invoice arrives.

Startup culture has, for years, promoted a narrow image of success: fast-moving founders, bold bets and the idea that you can figure things out as you go. That narrative is compelling and sometimes accurate, but it leaves out something far more predictive of long-term success: the value of experience in the room.

When you look at companies that actually scale and endure, one factor shows up consistently. It is not age, but applied experience. The real question is whether founders know how to use experience as an advantage.

The data tells a more useful story

The stereotype of the young, first-time founder persists, but the numbers point in a different direction. Here’s a stat that tends to shatter the way people think about startups: MIT notes that among “firms in the top 1/10 of the top 1%, in terms of growth, the average founder’s age is 45.” More importantly, founders with prior industry and operational experience are significantly more likely to build high-growth companies.

Young founders can, of course, succeed, but experience, whether it comes from past startups, operating roles or deep industry exposure, materially improves their odds. In practice, the strongest founding teams combine speed with judgment rather than relying on speed alone.

Clarity is what experience actually buys you

In early-stage companies, the biggest risk is often distraction. With too many opportunities and plausible paths forward, teams often spread themselves thin and lose momentum.

Experience sharpens prioritization. Leaders who have operated inside growing companies tend to make clearer decisions about what not to do because they have seen how quickly focus can drift and how difficult it is to regain. If you are building a company, make trade-offs explicit. Before adding a new initiative, decide what gets deprioritized. That discipline is what turns opportunity into progress.

Pattern recognition is a hidden form of speed

Startups pride themselves on moving quickly, but speed without pattern recognition often leads to repeated mistakes. Hiring the wrong leader, expanding too early or misreading demand are common problems across companies. Experience allows you to recognize these patterns earlier and respond with more confidence. Instead of solving every problem from scratch, experienced operators draw from prior outcomes.

You can build this capability internally by capturing lessons in real time. After key decisions such as hires, launches or pivots, document what worked and what did not. Over time, you create institutional experience even as a young company.

Discipline is what turns ideas into execution

Flexibility is valuable early on, but inconsistency quickly becomes a liability. Missed timelines, shifting priorities and unclear ownership are rarely strategic failures. They are execution breakdowns. Experience introduces structure where it matters. Leaders who have scaled teams understand how to create operating rhythms that support execution without slowing the business down.

For founders, this often comes down to a few fundamentals: stable weekly priorities, clear ownership and consistent check-ins focused on outcomes. Discipline protects your agility.

Resilience changes how decisions get made

Every startup faces volatility. The difference is how leaders interpret and respond to it. Without experience, it is easy to overreact by treating setbacks as crises or short-term wins as validation. Experience adds context. Leaders who have seen multiple cycles understand that progress is uneven, which allows them to stay focused and make more measured decisions.

One practical approach is to separate signal from noise. When something changes in your business, determine whether it reflects a real trend or a temporary event. Your response should match that distinction.

Experience matters most as you scale

The early stage rewards creativity and speed. Scaling rewards coordination and judgment. As companies grow, communication becomes more complex, decision-making slows and small misalignments compound. Many teams struggle simply because their operating model has not evolved.

Experience helps founders anticipate these shifts. It informs when to introduce process, how to structure teams and how to balance autonomy with alignment. The key is to design for scale before friction forces you to. Access to decades of experience creates a shortcut to hard-won answers. Why suffer through the headaches when you can find somebody who has already been down this road before?

Strong founders are deliberate about surrounding themselves with people who have seen what they have not, whether through co-founders, early hires or advisors. Waiting to figure it out later increases the cost of learning. Instead, identify where your experience gaps are today and address them early. That decision alone can accelerate your trajectory.

Expand the definition of a strong founder

This isn’t a choice between fresh thinking and experience — the best companies build both into the team from day one.

Take a medical software startup I work with. The founders are passionate, and the product works well, but none of them comes from a medical background. That gap could have been a liability. Instead, they moved quickly to bring in industry veterans as advisors — people who could kick the tires early and flag the hurdles before they became expensive mistakes.

The lesson scales beyond healthcare: if you don’t have the experience in-house, buy it. Bring on an advisor, hire an operator who’s scaled a similar business, or put a seasoned executive on your board before you need one. Waiting until a blind spot becomes a crisis is the expensive way to learn it. Founders who do this move fast without moving blindly. They still take risks — they just understand the trade-offs going in.

Startups will always celebrate speed and bold bets. But the companies built to last run on something quieter: better judgment, tighter discipline and a clear-eyed read of how businesses actually grow. If you want that edge, don’t wait to accumulate it yourself. Audit your team today for where your experience gaps are, and go find the people who’ve already closed them.

That is what experience brings into the room. In a market where everyone is moving fast, it may be the advantage that compounds the most over time.

Startup culture has, for years, promoted a narrow image of success: fast-moving founders, bold bets and the idea that you can figure things out as you go. That narrative is compelling and sometimes accurate, but it leaves out something far more predictive of long-term success: the value of experience in the room.

When you look at companies that actually scale and endure, one factor shows up consistently. It is not age, but applied experience. The real question is whether founders know how to use experience as an advantage.

The data tells a more useful story

The stereotype of the young, first-time founder persists, but the numbers point in a different direction. Here’s a stat that tends to shatter the way people think about startups: MIT notes that among “firms in the top 1/10 of the top 1%, in terms of growth, the average founder’s age is 45.” More importantly, founders with prior industry and operational experience are significantly more likely to build high-growth companies.

When founders ask me how to start with SEO, they usually expect a tool recommendation. The honest answer is that the tool isn’t the problem. The sequence is.

For the past few years, my agency has been refining the same end-to-end SEO process — the one I now use with every new client and break down across an eight-module curriculum we run for our team. The steps work because they’re ordered. Most founders fail at SEO not because they skip steps but because they do them in the wrong order: writing content before researching keywords, building links before fixing crawl errors and chasing traffic before defining what kind of traffic moves their business.

Here’s the 10-step sequence I follow, in the order I follow it. You can run all of it yourself for the cost of two free tools and a few weekends.

1. Start with niche research, not keyword research

Before you type a single seed keyword, define what your business actually has the right to win on. A skincare brand selling to dermatologists shouldn’t try to rank for best moisturizer. A SaaS for restaurant owners shouldn’t compete on small business software.

Write down the three or four sub-categories your business owns. Sanity-check each one against the competition in Google’s results. If the first page is dominated by Wikipedia, government sites and major publications, narrow further. Niche before keywords. Always.

Take 30 minutes and write down every phrase your customers actually use to describe their problem, in their own words. Look at your inbound emails, sales call transcripts and product reviews. The vocabulary your customers use rarely matches the vocabulary you use internally — and the customer vocabulary is what ranks.

Once you have a list of 30 to 50 seed terms, open Ahrefs or Google’s Keyword Planner. Tools are for expanding what you already know; they’re terrible at telling you what to know in the first place.

3. Layer in the specialty keyword types your competitors miss

There are at least nine specialty keyword formats most agencies ignore: geographic, seasonal, event-based, question-format, service-based, commercial, comparison, best-of and alternative-to. Each one maps to a different stage of the buying journey, and each one is usually less competitive than the obvious head terms.

In a recent niche project, layering comparison and alternative-to keywords on top of a head-keyword strategy roughly tripled the addressable search volume — without touching a single competitive primary term. The same pattern shows up in nearly every site I audit.

4. Tag every keyword by search intent before writing a word

Every keyword falls into one of four intent buckets: informational, navigational, transactional or commercial investigation. The same phrase can mean different things to different searchers, and the only way to know is to look at what’s currently ranking on page one. Google’s own guidance on understanding user intent comes down to the same principle: match your page to what the searcher actually wants.

If page one is full of blog posts, the intent is informational. If it’s full of product pages, the intent is transactional. Match your page type to the intent before you decide what to write. Mismatched intent is the single most common reason good content fails to rank.

5. Fix your technical foundation before publishing anything new

Before adding new pages, run your site through a free Screaming Frog crawl and Google’s PageSpeed Insights. Look for four things: crawl errors, broken internal links, slow Largest Contentful Paint on mobile and any redirect chains longer than one hop. Each one is silently capping the ceiling on every page you publish.

This is unglamorous work. It’s also the work that determines whether the next six months of effort compound or evaporate.

6. Standardize your on-page template across every new piece

Decide once, then never re-decide: how your title tags are written, how your H1 relates to your title tag, where your primary keyword appears, how internal links are formatted and what your URL structure looks like.

I keep a one-page template that goes on every content brief we send writers. It saves hours of editing per article and produces consistent results across writers who have never spoken to each other. Standardization is what lets you scale; ad-hoc decisions are what burn content teams out.

7. Build content in clusters, not in isolation

For every commercial keyword you target, plan a cluster: one pillar piece and three to five supporting pieces that link inward to it. Search engines reward sites that demonstrate topical depth, and clusters are the cleanest way to demonstrate it.

A single well-built cluster of six pages around one commercial topic will outperform 30 disconnected blog posts every time. Test that against your own analytics if you doubt it. The math is one-sided.

8. Earn links through original data, not cold outreach

Cold outreach link building has been the lowest-yield activity in SEO for at least three years. The replacement is original research: publish one piece per quarter that contains data nobody else has — even if your sample size is small. Journalists and bloggers cite primary sources because primary sources make their work easier.

Last year, one of our small-sample data pieces earned more high-authority backlinks in two months than a previous client’s six-month outreach campaign. The ratio wasn’t close.

9. Track three metrics monthly — and ignore the rest

The SEO industry has trained founders to obsess over dashboards. The truth is that three numbers tell you almost everything: how many of your targeted commercial keywords are ranking in positions 1 to 10, how much qualified organic traffic those rankings produce and how many of those visits assist a conversion.

Ranked positions tell you if your work is paying off. Traffic tells you if the rankings are valuable. Assisted conversions tell you if the traffic is worth the next month of investment. Everything else is noise until you’re operating at meaningful scale.

10. Audit, dedupe and prune every quarter

Most sites lose more SEO performance to keyword cannibalization, duplicate intent and stale content than they gain from new publishing. Every 90 days, audit your existing content: which pages are competing against each other for the same query, which are pulling impressions but no clicks and which are pulling neither?

Merge the cannibalizing pages. Refresh the impression-rich but click-poor pages with better titles and meta descriptions. Redirect the truly dead ones to their nearest healthy cousin. Pruning is unglamorous work that often produces the single biggest one-quarter SEO lift any site will ever see.

The system above isn’t proprietary. Every step is something a careful agency would do, in roughly the same order. What separates the founders who win at SEO from the ones who plateau isn’t access to a secret framework. It’s the discipline to do all 10 steps in sequence, on a quarterly cadence, for two to three years before judging the results.

By the time you do hire an agency, you’ll know exactly what to ask. The ones that can’t answer those questions will filter themselves out before they bill you.

When founders ask me how to start with SEO, they usually expect a tool recommendation. The honest answer is that the tool isn’t the problem. The sequence is.

For the past few years, my agency has been refining the same end-to-end SEO process — the one I now use with every new client and break down across an eight-module curriculum we run for our team. The steps work because they’re ordered. Most founders fail at SEO not because they skip steps but because they do them in the wrong order: writing content before researching keywords, building links before fixing crawl errors and chasing traffic before defining what kind of traffic moves their business.

Here’s the 10-step sequence I follow, in the order I follow it. You can run all of it yourself for the cost of two free tools and a few weekends.

The four moves any non-coder can use to launch a one-person business this week.

Key Takeaways:

• Discover what “vibe coding” really means — and why 63% of the people using it to build real businesses have never written a line of code.
• Watch how one solo founder built a $401 million business in year one with $20K and his brother as his only employee.
• Screenshot the exact Perplexity Computer prompts that reverse-engineer what four solo founders did to build their businesses — without figuring it out from scratch.

You have the idea. You have the laptop. You have every AI tool on the market open in a tab. And you are still not launching anything.

That is the quiet frustration behind the biggest shift in one-person business formation of the last decade. The tools are here. Most solopreneurs are still waiting to feel technical enough to start. The founders in the video above stopped waiting — and the moves they made are not what most solopreneurs expect.

The four moves I break down in the video above are designed to fix that — starting with the one most non-coders skip.

“Vibe coding” is the term Andrej Karpathy, one of the co-founders of OpenAI, coined in early 2025 to describe a new way of building software. You describe what you want in plain English, an AI writes the code, and you refine it by conversation instead of syntax. It sounded like a joke a year ago. According to Startup Fortune, it is now a $4.7 billion market growing at 38% a year, with 63% of active users identifying as non-developers.

This is not a fringe movement. Axios reported in June that Americans are starting one-person businesses 20% faster than they were a year ago, while startups planning to hire employees have stayed flat — a shift Nasdaq’s economists tie to autonomous coding tools. Intuit’s 2026 AI Impact Report, built on more than 34,000 SMB owners, found that 43% of AI-using businesses say AI has increased their revenue, versus just 2% who say it has gone the other way.

That compression is what Rule 5 of my book, The Wolf Is at the Door, is really about. In a world where the software builds itself, adaptability is no longer about learning faster than the market — it is about shortening the loop between what you see and what you launch. The reason a solo founder can now sell a company for $401 million with almost no employees is not that AI made him smart. It is that AI has collapsed the reaction time that used to give bigger competitors the advantage. That opportunity is now in your hands, no seven-figure marketing budget required.

This weeks video breaks down how Matthew Gallagher launched Medvi in two months with $20K and his brother as his only employee, how Billy Howell charges $750 to $2,500 per app with no coding background, how the creator behind BridgeMind made $42,630 in 142 days building live on YouTube, and how KEV hit $100,000+ in revenue and 67,000 users across four apps — plus the four Perplexity Computer prompts to reverse-engineer their moves in your own business this week.

Every founder, every move and every prompt is walked through in the video above — including the four Perplexity Computer prompts that turn what took these founders months of trial and error into a single afternoon of work.

The free AI Success Kit, available to download for a limited time, comes with a free chapter from my new book, The Wolf is at The Door – How to Survive and Thrive in an AI-Driven World.

The four moves any non-coder can use to launch a one-person business this week.

Key Takeaways:

• Discover what “vibe coding” really means — and why 63% of the people using it to build real businesses have never written a line of code.
• Watch how one solo founder built a $401 million business in year one with $20K and his brother as his only employee.
• Screenshot the exact Perplexity Computer prompts that reverse-engineer what four solo founders did to build their businesses — without figuring it out from scratch.

You have the idea. You have the laptop. You have every AI tool on the market open in a tab. And you are still not launching anything.

Bijo Thomas was expecting a human being to interview him for a job as a senior AI solutions architect role at talent acquisition brand Experis. When he opened up his laptop for an interview, he instead came face-to-face with an AI avatar named Sophie. 

Thomas recently told Business Insider about the experience. He said that Sophie looked like a human being from the neck up, and she smiled and asked follow-up questions throughout the interview. 

“It was very realistic,” Thomas told BI. He passed the interview and went through two more rounds, each time with human interviewers. He got the job and joined in May.  

Thomas’s experience reflects a growing trend. AI is moving beyond sorting through large piles of resumes and extending its reach to early-stage job interviews. Companies like cryptocurrency platform Coinbase and automation software company Zapier have quietly begun using AI to screen candidates in interviews, BI reported. 

Industries like retail and manufacturing first used AI in job interviews to meet high-volume hiring targets. Now the practice is gaining steam for weeding out candidates seeking full-time, white-collar positions. 

Employers are reluctant to publicize their dependence on AI 

Employers aren’t touting the use of AI systems in hiring, partly because of debate around AI. According to BI, it remains to be seen whether AI chatbots have a positive impact by reducing human bias in hiring or a negative effect by alienating candidates. 

“The interview process is arguably the most human part of recruiting,” Kyle Lagunas, an HR tech industry analyst, told BI. He added that employers could be concerned about how it would look to candidates to outsource this human element of recruiting to AI. 

At some companies, however, applicants must pass through AI interviews before they can make an impression on human interviewers — and at times, the AI gatekeepers are necessary due to the sheer volume of job applicants. For example, Coinbase faces a flood of applications, about 1.5 million per year, L.J. Brock, the platform’s chief people officer, told BI. 

“No matter how big my recruiting team is, no matter how hard we try, we can’t get to 1.5 million people,” he told the outlet. 

Coinbase turned to AI to manage interviews starting in August. The company introduced an AI interviewer named Milo to handle interviews for roles below the director level. Since Milo’s release, Coinbase has brought on more than 240 new hires initially filtered by the AI. 

Another company finds ‘hidden gems’ with AI interviews

Coinbase isn’t the only company to experiment with AI interviews. Zapier also rolled out AI interviews last year after realizing that its job postings immediately drew thousands of applicants — far more than it was possible for humans to screen on their own.

Tracy St.Dic, Zapier’s global head of talent, told BI that AI interviews have allowed the company to screen up to five times more applicants than normal and allowed candidates to advance through the hiring process on the basis of more than just their application and resume. St.Dic called these applicants “hidden gems.”

Bijo Thomas was expecting a human being to interview him for a job as a senior AI solutions architect role at talent acquisition brand Experis. When he opened up his laptop for an interview, he instead came face-to-face with an AI avatar named Sophie. 

Thomas recently told Business Insider about the experience. He said that Sophie looked like a human being from the neck up, and she smiled and asked follow-up questions throughout the interview. 

“It was very realistic,” Thomas told BI. He passed the interview and went through two more rounds, each time with human interviewers. He got the job and joined in May.